On today’s show I’m walking you through the steps of building a very basic, utilitarian shoe organizer. And I’ll admit it, I obviously didn’t pay close enough attention to the warning signs when things started to go bad!

It started out great. The components were milled in near record time, even with just having 30 minutes here and there during the week. I just never thought I’d be the victim of a glue-up catastrophe on this project!

Before

After

But even if the glue-up had gone perfect, this is the kind of project that gets tucked away in a closet or in the backroom where it gets used more than it gets seen. Which isn’t a bad thing! Sometimes we don’t want our projects just admired from a far, WE WANT THEM USED.

This project was also just the kind of thing that let us take the new SawStop table saw out for a spin to see what we think about it. So far? It’s a really nice table saw! And in the show today I even take a moment to demonstrate how easy it is to swap out the brake cartridge when switching from a regular 10″ blade, to a 8″ stacked dado set.

The construction of the shoe organizer included a few joinery techniques; mitered corners, thru dadoes and even the use of dowels. In hindsight, it was a glue-up nightmare, but when tackled with a little strategy (apparently better than the one I used) it’s possible to get the job done correctly.

I thought about that. I considered just doing something more basic than a miter joint with the MDO, but I wanted it to have clean edges and not have to deal with the layers exposed.

The next one, which is already being requested, will most likely be solid wood. This one just might be another episode…considering I’m thinking of using much different joinery and a slight change to the design.